A woman who values fertilized eggs or who believes her deity does should use the most highly effective contraceptive available.

Most fertilized eggs spontaneously abort during the first weeks of life. Estimates of death before implantation range as high as 80 percent and bottom out around 45. More than thirty percent of those that do implant later die on the vine. This means that unprotected sex produces more dead fertilized eggs than live babies.

Reality TV’s Duggar parents are fundamentalist Christian opponents of contraception and abortion who have produced “19 Kids and Counting.” Based on the live births that Michelle Duggar delivered, we might estimate that Michelle and her man-on-a-mission flushed somewhere between 17 and 75 embryos in order to get the family they have.

The Reproductive Funnel

The fact is that nature or nature’s god designed reproduction as a big funnel. A lot more eggs and sperm get made than will ever hook up with each other. Many more eggs get fertilized than will ever implant. And more zygotes implant than will ever grow into babies. The world’s major religions, including even the most extremist forms of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, tacitly acknowledge that these reproductive false starts are not people by declining to name or baptize the ones that women’s bodies expel on a regular basis.

If we are honest, even the most conservative Baptist or Bishop claims personhood status for the human embryo only when the decision making of women is at question. No religious sect argues that we should save as many embryos as possible among the hundreds of thousands that die daily. No religious hierarchy dedicates its formidable financial resources or political clout to making this a global priority on par with, say, ending starvation.

In his now classic Discover article, “The Good Egg” science writer Stephen Hull lays out what is known about the process of conception, and he points out the difficulty that biology poses for those who want embryonic life legally protected:

The high failure rate begs challenging ethical questions. If life begins at conception, as many believe, why are so many lives immediately taken? If, as some ethicists argue, nascent life must be protected, how do we assess the degree of moral entitlement due a nascent entity that fails to pass nature’s own muster perhaps 80 percent of the time? And if the fate of an organism is indeed inscribed in the earliest biological inklings of an egg, does life begin with the gametes [the egg and sperm]?

Ethicist Toby Orb at Oxford says that if embryos have the same moral standing as persons, then spontaneous embryonic death should be the most horrendous moral problem of our time. He compares it to a plague that he calls The Scourge:

The Scourge struck swiftly and brutally. This terrifying new disease, more deadly than any before it, left no part of the world untouched. From the poorest countries in Africa to the richest countries in the West, it killed with equal, horrifying efficiency. It struck quickly, killing most of its victims within a few weeks of onset, and silently, for there were no detectable symptoms prior to death. Before the Scourge, the global death rate was 55 million per annum. That is, all causes of death—old age, war, murder, disease, and so on—conspired to take 55 million lives each year. The Scourge changed this dramatically. It alone killed more than 200 million people every year. . . . . Compared with the Scourge, all other problems seemed insignificant. . . . Other projects had to be put on hold and a major international effort directed toward loosening the Scourge’s grip upon humanity.

Groups that claim moral equivalence between embryos and persons and then fail to treat spontaneous embryo death as The Scourge are hypocritical, at best. That said, there is wisdom in their failure to walk the walk.

The Wisdom of Spontaneous Abortion

The processes that knit together the beginnings of life are incredibly effective in the long run, but at least at the start, they optimize for quantity over quality. Fertilized eggs and multi-celled blastulas and even more complex embryos wither for many reasons, not the least being that reproduction is hugely imperfect and a lot of egg-sperm mergers are defective. Alternately, they may flush out because the slow journey from fallopian tube to uterus got interrupted, or the mother’s womb wasn’t quite ready, or her immune system treated the embryo as a foreign invader; or for reasons yet unknown. Contraception researcher Dr. David Grimes describes the fascinating beginning stages of human life, how things go wrong, and how impressively nature eliminates most of the faulty embryos in his book, Every Third Woman.

Virtually all sexual reproduction, whether of plants or animals, follows a similar pattern, with lots of false starts built into the equation and a fertility rate that compensates. No farmer expects every seed to grow. Somewhat ironically, the Christian Bible reminds us of this in a story known as the Parable of the Sower:

A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain. (Matthew 13: 3-8 NRSV)

How Contraceptives Prevent Conception And Spontaneous Abortion

The fact that fertilized egg death is so common means that all birth control methods available today reduce the rate of embryonic hari-kari, and the more effective the contraceptive the more this is true. Top tier contraceptives, including the IUDs so hated by the Hobby Lobbyists, prevent more egg death daily than every pro-life picketer in America combined. And that’s not even counting how much therapeutic abortion decreases when women have access to better birth control.

Here is how top tier contraceptives actually work:

The etonogestrel implant (Nexplanon) categorically shuts down ovulation. It has a published annual pregnancy rate around 1 in 2000 but in reality every pregnancy that occurred during clinical trials was conceived after the implant was removed. No egg, no fertilization, nothing to implant or abort. The fact that it also thins the uterine lining and thickens cervical mucus is largely irrelevant because women on the implant basically don’t ovulate.

The levonorgestrel IUD (Mirena, Skyla) thickens the mucus plug at the entrance to the uterus, so that sperm can’t get through. No access, no fertilization, nothing to implant or abort. Once settled into place, it has an annual pregnancy rate around 1 in 800. Secondarily, a hormonal IUD also thins the endometrium, which is why periods decrease by 90 percent over time—which, incidentally, has some serious health benefits. A sperm that managed to get through and fertilize an egg would meet an unprepared uterus, but preventing implantation is not the big way this IUD prevents pregnancy. We can be confident that fertilized egg death in this case is less common than it would be without the protection—or with less effective protection like the Pill, which in real world use, has a 1 in 11 pregnancy rate.

The nonhormonal copper IUD (Paragard; annual pregnancy rate 1 in 500) releases ions that act as a spermicide impairing a little egg-seeker’s ability to swim. They may alter the surface of the egg as well, preventing penetration. In other words, the primary and intended mechanisms of pregnancy prevention—despite all squawking to the contrary—are anti-conceptive aka contraceptive not abortifacient. IUDs may also heighten an immune response in the reproductive tract. It should be noted that of the top tier birth control methods, the Copper IUD is least effective and most likely to end up with a situation where a fertilized egg might bump up against the IUD itself and then flush out. But this happens far less often than when a women is not contracepting or is using a less effective family planning method. That includes the Pill, the condom and especially the rhythm method or “let go and let God.”

To summarize, top tier contraceptives are designed to prevent conception. This is their primary and intended mode of action and because they are so effective at what they do, for most women this is their only effect. Should an egg and sperm meet, unite, and then die, that is a failure of the purpose for which these contraceptives were designed. Based on all evidence available this is a rare event, and much less rare than when a woman is either not contracepting or is using a less effective method of family planning.

I remember the debate over stem cell research where an attempt was made to allow for some time to do research. Some scientists had requested to be legally allowed to have 7 days after fertilization in the petri dish or test tube. Inside a real female that would amount to fallopian tube travel time and possibly the earliest implantation time of about half a week. The Republicans in the executive branch said no. The scientists then reduced the request to 3.5 days or 84 hours. Fallopian tube travel time. The answer was no. No amount of time was acceptable to the administration because the religious zealots thought it amounted to killing babies.

This is the only place I have heard the argument that all fertilized eggs are equal – those that implant and those that do not. The aversion is to the intentional destruction of human life, not to the natural process that results in the fertilized egg failing to implant. Couples who do not want to begin a family should always use contraception. Couples that fail to use contraception should not resort to abortion or abortifacients simply to prevent the inconvenience (or “punishment, as President Obama referred to it) of a baby. Equating the Duggar family with abortionists in order to make your point is disingenuous.

What if a couple does not fail to use contraception but contraception fails them? What if the “inconvenience” is the inability to care adequately for other children who already exist or stacking the odds against them ever getting out of poverty? What if the inconvenience is saddling those other children for the rest of their lives with a grossly defective sibling? Who are you to judge that other people make these decisions so carelessly or that your spiritual values and beliefs about what it means to be a good, loving, responsible parent trumps ours?

To respond to your last point, I actually do quite seriously equate the Duggars with parents who have abortions. Both believe that their deepest values about parenting trump the question of whether embryonic life is destroyed in the process of honoring those values. Both believe that their responsibilities to themselves, each other,their society and Goodness matters more than the question of whether embryos are created and then die. Both believe the sacrifice of embryonic life is a price worth paying in the quest to create a loving healthy family. And I agree with them.

Dave, you said: “This is the only place I have heard the argument that all fertilized eggs are equal – those that implant and those that do not.” Really?? Where have you been? I hear it all the time from “pro-life” people who tell me that a fertilized ovum from the very moment of conception – as soon as the sperm and egg bond to create unique DNA – is in every way a complete human person. Implantation (or birth for that matter!) has no particular importance, because human life is a continuum from conception to natural death, and the newly fertilized ovum is equally as much a “baby” as a newborn! Of course, to be fair, they only bring this up in the context of a woman intentionally preventing implantation of the egg; they are not at all concerned about the loss of the much greater number of “babies” that spontaneously abort. So the distinction is not between fertilized ova that implant, and those that don’t. Rather, the ones that the woman does NOT want to keep are awarded greater value which, as you have pointed out, is based on aversion to the woman having a choice in the matter.

– I raised the issue that forced birth is “involuntary servitude.” The anti-choice response was that there can be no such thing as an “unwilling” pregnancy so long as the woman voluntarily engaged in sex, even if she did NOT intend to become pregnant and used reasonable birth-control methods to prevent it, because pregnancy is a KNOWN consequence of that activity, by engaging in which she is responsible for whatever happens. In the same breath, they told me that the woman is NOT responsible for loss of embryos, also a known and statistically MORE LIKELY outcome of sex, because she did not intend for them to die. It seems to me we can’t have it both ways: Either we are responsible for the known biological consequences of sex – which include BOTH pregnancy AND embryo loss – or we are not. Either our “intention” matters in both cases, or it doesn’t. Or am I missing something here?

I think your argument is flawed. The facts that you cite to prove your point actually do weaken it. That is BECAUSE a healthy pregnancy that will, most probably, result in a birth of a healthy child, we should never equate abortion and natural selection. Every woman should be able to make her choice and have access to safe abortion. But, again, BECAUSE healthy pregnancy is a miracle, it really sucks to be that woman who has to make that choice to terminate a perfectly viable pregnancy.